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THE GENIUS OF THE COSMOPOLITAN CITY 



An Address 



DELIVERED BEFORE 



Ci)e JBteto iorli flistorical ^ocietp 

ON ITS 

NINETY-NINTH ANNIVERSARY, 

Tuesday, November 17, 1903, 

BY 

Mr. HAMILTON W. MABIE. 




NEW YORK 
PRINTED FOR THE SOCIETY 

1904 



THE GENIUS OF THE COSMOPOLITAN CITY 



An Address 



DELIVERED BEFORE 



Cfje #tto iort flistorical ^octet? 

ON ITS 

iV/TV^^ r Y-NINTH ANNIVERSAR V, 

Tuesday, November 17, 1903, 



Mr. HAMILTON W.' MABIE. 



NEW YORK 
PRINTED FOR THE SOCIETY 

1904 






p. 
Publ. 

3tMr'04 



OFFICERS OF THE SOCIETY, 1904. 



PRESIDENT, 

SAMUEL VERPLANCK HOFFMAN. 

FIRST VICE-PRESIDENT, 

FREDERIC WENDELL JACKSON. 

SECOND VICE-PRESIDENT, 

FRANCIS ROBERT SCHELL. 

FOREIGN CORRESPONDING SECRETARY, 

ARCHER MILTON HUNTINGTON. 

DOMESTIC CORRESPONDING SECRETARY, 

GEORGE RICHARD SCHIEFFELIN. 

RECORDING SECRETARY, 

SYDNEY HOWARD CARNEY, Jr., M.D. 

TREASURER, 

CHARLES AUGUSTUS SHERMAN. 

LIBRARIAN, 

ROBERT HENDRE KELBY, 



EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE. 



FIRST CLASS FOR ONE YEAR, ENDING 1905. 

JOHN A. WEEKES, J. PIERPONT MORGAN, 

GEORGE R. SCHIEFFELIN. 

SECOND CLASS FOR TWO YEARS, ENDING 1906. 

F. ROBERT SCHELL, DANIEL PARISH, Jr., 

FREDERIC WENDELL JACKSON. 

THIRD CLASS FOR THREE YEARS, ENDING 1907. 

ISAAC J. GREENWOOD, CLARENCE STORM, 
JAMES WILLIAM BEEKMAN. 

FOURTH CLASS FOR FOUR YEARS, ENDING 1908. 

GHERARDI DAVIS, WALTER L. SUYDAM, 

FRANK TILFORD. 

DANIEL PARISH, Jr., Chairman. 

ROBERT H. KELBY, Secretary. 

[The President, Recording Secretary, Treasurer, 
and Librarian are members of the Executive Committee. ] 



THE GENIUS OF THE COSMOPOLITAN 

CITY. 



The New York Historical Society has now laid 
the corner-stone of a structure which is to be, for 
many years to come, not only the repository of 
its valuable collections and the home of its activ- 
ities, but the sign and symbol of the unbroken life 
of the metropolis. Beginning its career ninety- 
nine years ago, this Society was first housed in the 
old City Hall, in which the Congress of the United 
States held its sittings after the adoption of the 
Constitution, and on the balcony of which Wash- 
ington was inaugurated first President of the Re- 
public. The growth of the city during the century 
has been registered by the steady progression of 
the Society northward. Six times it has changed 
its quarters and each change has carried it farther 
from its original base. Now, for the eighth time, it 
finds a new home for itself and one far more com- 
modious and beautiful than any in which it has 
heretofore been housed. 

When Chancellor Kent spoke on this anniver- 
sary seventy-six years ago he declared that the 
Dutch colonial annals are of " a tame and pacific 

5 



6 TJie Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. 

character, and generally dry and uninteresting." 
To us they are rich not only in the materials which 
give color and movement to narrations of fact, but 
in the humor and pathos which are the soul of fic- 
tion. When George Bancroft spoke at the semi- 
centennial celebration, twenty-four years later, the 
larger meaning of the beginnings of the city and 
the Republic had become clear. " Our land," he 
said, " is not more the recipient of the men of all 
countries than of their ideas." And after enumerat- 
ing the gifts of India and Palestine, of Greece and 
Rome, of Spain, France, Italy, Holland and Eng- 
land to the American state, he declared that our 
country stands " more than any other as the reali- 
zation of the unity of the race." Twelve years 
later, on the sixty-second celebration of this anni- 
versary. Dr. Osgood saw the spiritual significance 
of the city realized in part : " Here already, in its 
best hours," he said, " our New York has glimpses 
of the true human fellowship, which is the organ- 
ized liberty of the nineteenth century." 

It is because we have learned the vitality of the 
ties that bind us to the past and make us, in body 
and mind, in ideal and institution, the children of 
our fathers, that history has taken on a new and 
deeper meaning for us. The Greeks, with charac- 
teristic insight, made Memory the Mother of the 
Muses ; for neither knowledge, nor song, nor art, 
nor religion, nor society are possible without 
memory. 



The Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. 7 

History is the memory of the race ; that memory 
which age leaves undimmed, and which time deep- 
ens and broadens with the sweep of years. Here, 
where New York Hves and will live, not in the 
tumult and rush of the moment but in the unbroken 
life of the centuries, the Soul of the Metropolis 
makes its record, and here they who seek to un- 
derstand its genius must come. 

It has been said of a certain American city that 
it is not a place but a state of mind. Truth is 
often spoken in jest, especially if the jest have the 
savor and insight of wit ; and there is a half-truth 
in this bit of humorous characterization. There is 
something more in a city than its visible order, its 
material structure, its drives and parks and mu- 
seums and works of art ; there is its spirit. Every 
city has a genius, a spiritual individuality, as dis- 
tinctive as the genius of the greatest man who 
grows up in its shelter. For a city is something 
more than a collection of persons ; if you are try- 
ing to understand what it stands for in the world 
you will get little aid from the directory; it is an 
entity which records and reveals itself in many 
ways, remaining itself invisible. It has many of the 
qualities and attributes of personality ; it thinks, it 
feels and it acts. And in thinking, feeling and act- 
ing it is not a composite person, made up of the 
traits of all its citizens ; it is a force distinct from 
them ; an influence which does not emanate wholly 
from them, but definitely, persistently and power- 



8 TJie Geiiuts of the Cosmopolitan City. 

fully affects them. It makes a very real difference 
whether one is born in Boston or in New York or 
in Charleston. Each of these cities has its own 
history, ideals, point of view ; and the child can no 
more escape the influence of these potent elements 
of education than it can escape the climatic influ- 
ences which rise out of the earth and pervade the 
atmosphere. 

Genius, an American essayist has said, is not a 
single power but a combination of great powers. 
The genius of a city is a power created by a com- 
bination of powers of earth and of air ; by its loca- 
tion, the circumstances which determined its earli- 
est activities, the quality and force of the men who 
laid its foundations, the reflex influence of its leaders 
in successive generations. And this soul of a city, 
which gives inspiration, direction, color to its mani- 
fold life, attains at last such definite individuality 
that it is unconsciously personified and becomes 
the genius of the city, the spirit of the locality ; 
that searching, penetrating influence, which broods 
over childhood, and gathers about itself the senti- 
ment of maturity, and takes on a kind of radiance 
from the memories of age ; an influence which 
our ancestors of Latin blood embodied in those 
lesser deities with whom they lived in the inti- 
macies of the home, the field, the footpath and the 
spring. 

Florence, Venice, Edinburgh, Boston and New 
York not only differ in the aspects they wear to the 



The Genius of the Cosmopolitan City- 9 

eye, but still more in the impression they convey 
to the imagination. Venice and Florence were sep- 
arated by a little stretch of two hundred and fifty 
miles, but if they had been as far apart as the ends 
of the earth they could hardly have differed more 
radically in the years when their activities were at 
the flood. It is a five hours' journey from New 
York to Boston, but what numerals could express 
the divergence of their points of view ? This differ- 
ence, it is well to remember, is not expressed in 
terms of superiority or of inferiority but of varia- 
tion. If I say that the New England capital 
breathes a more rarefied air than the metropolis I do 
not necessarily mean that the souls of the good are 
made perfect there more rapidly than here. If I 
speak of the repose of that hospitable city which still 
cherishes the virtues of the Friends, I do not neces- 
sarily imply that a man can save his soul as well as 
his nerves more easily in Philadelphia than in New 
York. If I comment on the swiftness of the move- 
ment of life in Chicago, I do not necessarily mean 
that a man reaches desirable ends there more 
quickly than here. It is an interesting fact that, 
while American cities are prone to gibe at one an- 
other, they are all agreed in regarding New York 
as the most material, luxurious, money-loving and 
unmoral community in the new world. It has be- 
come a tradition that whatever New York is, it is 
not intellectual, religious, moral, homogeneous, 
beautiful, or American ; and New Yorkers have be- 



lo The Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. 

come so accustomed to this state of the provincial 
mind that they long ago ceased to deny, to explain, 
or to apologize. We may all be persons of foreign 
birth ; we may not know people on our own block ; 
we may waste our bodies and despoil our souls be- 
low Fourteenth Street in order that our wives and 
daughters may wear Paris gowns on Murray Hill ; 
we may pay pew-rent in fashionable churches, and 
spend so much time in Lenox, Newport, Florida, 
Southern California and on the Riviera that we are 
useless for religious work ; all these things, which 
citizens of other cities lay at our doors, we may be 
and do ; but, in view of our silence and patience 
under accusation, one virtue we may claim : the 
cosmopolitan virtue of geniality. When Boston 
disapproves of our devotion to business, and Phila- 
delphia is pained by our easy forgetfulness of an- 
cestral qualifications, and Chicago points the fin- 
ger of scorn at the deliberation of our movements 
we do not reply in kind. It may be that we have 
sunk too low ; it may be that we have seen too 
many phases and crazes come and go ; it may be 
that we have attained the cosmopolitan virtue of at- 
tending strictly to our own affairs ; it may be that 
we have so much to do that we have accepted as 
our rule of life a famous counsel of Dr. Jowett's to 
a friend who was going through a fiery furnace of 
criticism : " Retract nothing, explain nothing, get it 
done, and let them howl." 

This great city of ours, with its diversities of 



TJie Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. 1 1 

race, of religion, of social, political and personal 
ideals — has it a unity which the country has as yet 
failed to recognize, a genius which belongs to the 
future rather than to the past, and which, because 
it is of the future, is slow to reveal itself? We 
forget that New York is not only the first of cities 
of modern birth in magnitude of population and 
interests, but that it is also a city of a new type. 
Its very diversities are creating here a kind of city 
which men have not seen before ; in which a unity 
of a more inclusive, if not of a higher, order is 
slowly forming itself; a city the genius of which 
has the light of prophecy in it. 

From its earliest beginnings, New York has been 
a composite community ; location, settlement, com- 
merce and original population determined its type 
at the very start. What it is to-day on a great 
scale it was when only a handful of houses were 
irregularly grouped about the fort on the Battery. 
The noble harbor and the low, grassy point of land 
on which the future cosmopolitan city was to rise, 
were first seen by an Englishman, holding a Dutch 
commission, commandinof a crew of rouo-h sea-does 
drawn from the seaports of England and from the 
dykes of Holland, in a high-built, clumsy craft of 
Dutch make, but bearing an English name. The 
Half-Moon, coming up the harbor on a September 
day in 1609, two years after the settlement at 
Jamestown and eleven years before that at Ply- 
mouth, was a typical forerunner of a vast flotilla. 



12 TJie Gcniiis of the Cosmopolitan City. 

bearing men and women of many races, from all 
parts of Europe, to feed the population of a city 
which is affiliated by racial ties with all parts of 
the globe. Love of nature was by no means the 
foremost interest of the crew of the Half-Moon, 
but that first voyage up the Hudson, when Tap- 
pan Zee slept in a September haze and the purple 
shadows softened the outlines of the Catskills until 
they lay against the western sky like dream-moun- 
tains, must have touched the quick, passionate 
seventeenth century imagination. 

The thrifty, adventurous Dutch, who knew so well 
how to curb and how to use the sea, whose keen 
intelligence, resolute will and capacity for heroic 
endeavor are revealed in the faces that look down 
from the walls of the g-alleries of the Hao^ue, Haar- 
lem and Amsterdam — men whose features have 
often been caricatured, but whose spirits bore the 
touch of the highest distinction, if Rembrandt and 
Franz Hals are to be believed — were not slow 
to follow up the opening for trade in the new 
world ; for then, as now, the underlying motive 
in international activity was gaining access to 
more customers and a wider distribution for native 
products. 

The earliest buildings in New York were the 
huts of fur-traders, and the first permanent settle- 
ment was made and the first government conducted 
by a commercial corporation of such magnitude that 
it does not greatly suffer by comparison with simi- 



77!^' Gfiiius of the Cosmopolitan City. 13 

lar organizations to-day. The West India Com- 
pany, chartered by the States General of Holland, 
like the Hudson Bay Company and the English 
East India Company was endowed by law with 
those governmental privileges and powers which are 
still surreptitiously exercised by their corporate suc- 
cessors. And it was not without significance that 
the West India Company, authorized not only to 
trade in the new country, but to govern as well, 
started upon its career as a fully-developed mo- 
nopoly. Thus, at the very beginning, trade and 
monopoly stood sponsors for the city of the future. 
In New England, a little later, they were praising 
God and killing the Indians with right good will ; 
in Virginia they were building up vast estates, 
shipping tobacco to England, and living merrily in 
the wilderness, sharpening the dull edge of frontier 
life with the racing of horses, the fighting of cocks, 
and those liberal potations which have not ceased 
to be mixed in that genial country ; in New York 
they were selling for as much and buying for as 
little as possible. The commercial instinct, which 
we all deplore without for a moment giving up the 
luxuries with which it surrounds us, was more 
frankly avowed in New York than in the colonies 
to the north and south ; but it is to be feared that 
it was not a whit more controlling at the bottom. 
Piety did not blunt the business sagacity of the 
New Englander ; and renunciation was not the 
habitual practice of the Virginia colonists. 



14 TJic Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. 

There is a good deal of choice in the matter of 
descriptive words ; some words are much better- 
bred than others ; but the dispassionate student of 
history is compelled to admit that they often de- 
scribe the same conditions. At the west end of the 
beautiful old church at Dives, on the coast of Nor- 
mandy, whence William the Conqueror set sail for 
England in 1066, is inscribed the long list of the 
names of his companions in arms. These names 
have taken on a orolden hue in the softened liorht 
of almost nine centuries ; but it is to be feared that 
close scrutiny of the aims of the men who bore 
them would reveal quite as much self-seeking, 
greed and general unscrupulousness as marked the 
dealings of the New Englanders with the Indians, 
of the Virginians with one another, and of the 
primitive New Yorkers with the rest of the world. 
The mailed knight who beat the life out of his fel- 
low in order that he might possess his lands and 
bequeath them to his own heirs and assigns for- 
ever, was not, after all, much more a gentleman 
than his less imposing brother who, by the arts of 
peace and in ways of pleasantness, persuaded his 
fellow to part with his property at something be- 
low its cost. The early settlers of New York were 
not greedy sinners, with a colony of saints at the 
north and a colony of chivalrous and self-sacrificing 
gentlemen at the south ; they were, like all the 
other colonists, saints at times and sinners at 
others ; serving God and Mammon after the man- 



The Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. 1 5 

ner of all their ancestors and a large majority of 
their descendants. 

They were not only traders, but sailors and 
soldiers, who braved all manner of perils that they 
might buy and sell, and faced calmly all the chances 
of fortune that they might increase their posses- 
sions. The commercial instinct worked along he- 
roic lines and was rarely divorced from the courage 
and endurance which went far to redeem the greed 
of the seventeenth century as they go far to re- 
deem that of the twentieth. 

Never was there a more shocking example of the 
enormity of the unearned increment than is afforded 
by the fact that New York was bought in 1626 for 
$24 ! There were then about two hundred people 
living about the Battery, and wolves and bears 
wandered at will in the neighborhood of Grace 
Church and Union Square. It was a small com- 
munity which was first known as New Amsterdam ; 
a weak outpost of civilization, with an old world 
behind it perilous to reach in the clumsy yachts 
of the time, and a new world of savage life 
and mysterious depths of forest before it. But it 
was already a cosmopolitan community, with a mix- 
ture of races and a confusion of tongues prophetic 
of the later city. The Dutch were in possession of 
the government and — what was far more impor- 
tant — of the monopoly ; but there were Englishmen, 
Frenchmen and Germans living side by side with 
them; and during the forty years of Dutch su- 



1 6 TJic Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. 

premacy, these main streams of population flowed 
with fairly even current. 

As conditions became more settled immigration 
of a higher grade fed the little frontier town, and 
men of substance, entitled to use those coats of 
arms which have been so extensively pillaged in 
our own time, came in increasing numbers to become 
the founders of influential colonial families, and 
to give the popular movements of a later day coura- 
geous and competent leadership. Of men of the 
class known in the old world as gentlemen there 
were as many in New Amsterdam and along the 
Hudson to Albany as in Virginia, in South Caro- 
lina or in Massachusetts. They came from the 
cities of Holland, from old and from New England, 
from Germany and from France ; but the most in- 
fluential men of the colony were Dutchmen, English- 
men and Frenchmen. The first brought staying 
power and solid qualities of many kinds ; the Eng- 
lishman brought his highly trained capacity for 
governnient ; the Huguenot his power of devotion, 
and that charm of manner which was to give the 
rough setting of social life on the edge of the wil- 
derness a touch of old-world dignity and refine- 
ment. Then there was a mixed population, made 
up of apprentices and redemptioners, largely of Eng- 
lish and Irish blood ; for the Irish — for good and 
for ill, for pleasure and for pain, in prosperity and 
in adversity- — have always been with us, to con- 
tribute to our many-sided life the irresistible charm 



The Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. 1 7 

and the wayward impulses of the Cekic tempera- 
ment. There was a considerable representation of 
the shifdess, incompetent and irresponsible among 
the white population ; and there was a considerable 
group of slaves, recendy imported from Africa and 
but a litde removed from the savage state. No 
less than eighteen languages and dialects were 
spoken in the little town. 

There were, a litde later, great patroons ruling 
estates hundreds of miles square; there were sub- 
stantial houses, with broad halls and spacious 
rooms, furnished with those huge four-post, cano- 
pied beds in which our well-to-do ancestors smoth- 
ered on summer nights ; there were massive cab- 
inets and tables ; the walls were hung with portraits 
as significant of family pride as they were free from 
all suggestions of art ; there were great clocks and 
heavy silver plate glorious with blazonry of arms. 
There were rambling, old-fashioned gardens, laid 
out with mathematical exactness, but redolent of 
the fragrance of old-fashioned flowers and dear to 
the birds which" are of a fashion of God's making. 
There were ladies in beautiful apparel ; for our 
grandmothers were quite as attractive as their grand- 
daughters ; there were gendemen in silk stock- 
in2:s and knee-breeches and velvet doublets and 
lone coats, ornamented with silver ; for in those 
stirring days man was far more free to make him- 
self beautiful than in these monotonous days of 
London fashion-plates and no color save an occa- 



1 8 The Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. 

sional flash of the old audacity in his neckwear. 
There was much eating and deep drinking; there 
was persistent seeking of pleasure, for our ances- 
tors were singularly like ourselves. And there 
were men and women in hovels, ignorant and 
wretched and vicious ; and there were semi-savage 
slaves. It is clear that New York beg-an her civic 
career with a full equipment of the conditions and 
problems which perplex the modern city. She had 
many races to unify ; many diversities of religion, 
language and social ideal to harmonize ; many 
apparently antagonistic elements to fuse into one 
homogeneous community. 

She had diversity and variety — prime elements 
in the cosmopolitan city ; she had also in very early 
times the quality which makes the blending of 
these elements possible — toleration. The Dutch 
Lutheran, the English Churchman and the French 
Calvinist lived together on a basis of mutual recog- 
nition of differences of creed and practice. The 
takino- of the oath of alleofiance made men of all 
faiths, save one, equal before the law. Quakers 
and Baptists, fleeing from the militant conscience of 
New England, found refuge in New Amsterdam, 
and Roman Catholics were later included in this 
broad zone of toleration. The old church in the 
fort on the Battery was a symbol of the larger 
comprehension and wider sympathies of a later 
day ; in the morning, within its bare but hospitable 
walls, a service was held in Dutch, at mid-day in 



TJie Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. ig 

French, and in the afternoon in English ; while the 
Roman Catholics worshipped in a chapel close at 
hand. There is no evidence that these Christians 
were corrupted by their friendly relations with one 
another ; and their descendants are every whit as 
loyal to their religious convictions as are the de- 
scendants of the men who, in that age, were beat- 
ing out one another's brains because they could 
not agree on a standard translation of the funda- 
mental article of the Christian religion, " God is 
love." 

In the beginning there was not only religious 
liberty, but political equality as vv^ell. The port of 
New York was as open in the seventeenth century 
as it is in the twentieth. There was no statue of 
liberty in the harbor in those days, but men of 
every faith and race found the same welcome when 
they set foot in the little town. Seventeen years 
after the organization of the colony in New Am- 
sterdam a popular meeting was called by a direc- 
tor whose lack of wisdom and moderation had 
brought the community to the verge of ruin, and 
a council of representative men formed ; and this 
council promptly protested against the arbitrary 
measures of the director, and demanded sub- 
stantial self-government. 

In an aee in which Puritan and Churchman were 
laying unfriendly hands on one another in England, 
and Louis the 14th was withdrawing the protec- 
tion of the government from the Huguenots and by 



20 T]ie Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. 

one more act of stupidity was striking at the roots 
of moral stability in France, and men of many 
nations were hedging political rights about with all 
manner of religious restrictions, New Yorkers went 
to church when and where they liked, and were 
counted before the law as of one blood. 

When the colony passed under English rule, their 
civil and religious rights were guaranteed to the 
Dutch, and the privilege of naturalization to all 
foreigners was reaffirmed. The English element 
in the population had long been influential, and the 
only change effected by the lowering of the Dutch 
and the raising of the English flag at the Battery, 
was the shifting of the balance of power from one 
group of citizens to another. The second English 
ruler of the city — a charming gentleman of Cavalier 
breeding, who bore the name of the most gracious 
of Cavalier singers, Lovelace — won all hearts by 
equal intimacy with the English, the French and the 
Dutch, and in a club which he organized the three 
languages were spoken ; and the English service 
was still held in the Dutch church. In 1683, the 
Duke of York, the patron of the city, whose name 
has in consequence at least one pleasant and credi- 
table association, granted to the colony a charter, 
by the terms of which the right of self-taxation 
(with certain minor exceptions), of self-govern- 
ment, and liberty of conscience and of religion were 
guaranteed to all. This charter, James, Duke of 
York, graciously signed and sealed but forgot to 



Tlic Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. 21 

deliver; a slip of memory which James, become the 
second of his name on the English throne, omitted 
to make good. The colony proceeded, however, 
as if this generous document were in force ; and one 
of the earliest acts taken under it was the confer- 
ring of all the rights of citizenship upon all white for- 
eigners who should take the oath of allegiance. 

These broad lines of tolerance and equality, thus 
early marked out in New York, were not always 
consistently respected ; and the city was to pass 
through many changes of civic order before the 
success of the party of liberty in the War of the 
Revolution made this wide foundation of freedom 
of thought and action, of equality of creeds before 
the law, and equality of races in the rights and 
privileges of citizenship, permanent ; but the note 
struck thus early, was expressive of its spirit and 
prophetic of its history. 

It was to be a cosmopolitan or world-city ; a place 
where the races were to mingle with mutual respect 
and toleration, to give the new world a metropolis 
of a new type. While the men of the Massachu- 
setts colonies were drawing ecclesiastical lines 
about the franchise, the men of New York, who 
had apparently a higher opinion of God or of 
themselves, were throwing all the doors open and 
inviting everybody to come in. Our hospitality, 
thus early illustrated to the world, has cost us a 
good deal in many ways, and we are still bearing 
its burdens and meeting its draughts on our faith, 



22 TJie Genius of the Cosniopolitan City. 

our patience and our g-enerosity. It has given our 
friends in the provinces, south and west, the op- 
portunity of saying that New York is the least 
American of cities because it is the least homoge- 
neous. But it is fair to ask " which is the most 
distinctively American, the community in which the 
citizens are all of one blood, or that in which many 
races combine to create a new race?" If America 
is simply an extension of England in the new world, 
then New York is the least American of cities ; but 
if America stands for a different order of society, a 
new kind of political and social unity, a fresh ar- 
rangement of the various families of men on a freer 
and broader basis, then New York is the most 
American of cities. 

As there is nowhere in the world purity of race, 
in the sense of one blood flowing without interfu- 
sion of other blood for a long term of years, it is 
clearly a relative matter. We are all immigrants ; 
the only difference between us is one of dates of 
arrival. Those of us who came early are inclined 
to draw the line at the Revolution, and to assert that 
the only pure American is of colonial descent. This 
is, however, an arbitrary division, and its chief use 
is to serve as the occasion for the oro-anization of 
certain pleasant ancestral societies, and the eating 
of a number of excellent dinners every winter with 
the cheerful feeling that only the oldest fami- 
lies are represented at the festal board. For we 
all came here in ships as our English ancestors 



The Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. 23 

came to their delightful island, driving out the first 
families with such thoroughness, that no trace of 
them remains in the society of to-day, and then pro- 
ceeding to form other and later families of Saxon 
and Norman stock with the masterful assurance of 
the ruling races. For Americans, as for English- 
men and many other races, the alternatives are de- 
scent from savages or from immigrants. . 

No single vessel brought all the settlers and all 
^ their furniture in one voyage to New York. That 
feat has been performed but twice in the history of 
the world ; and much eloquence has made both the 
Ark and the Mayflower distasteful to us. We came 
in many ships ; some of us came in the first cabin 
and some in the steerage — the Ark and the Mayflower 
are the only ships in which all the passengers were 
the same grade ; we sailed from many ports ; we 
had many creeds and were accustomed to many 
kinds of social and political habit ; and we have been 
living together, not ideally, but peacefully, prosper- 
ously and with a growing liking for one another, 
for a matter of almost three hundred years — that is 
the story of New York in a paragraph. Its full 
meaning becomes clear only when it is placed side 
by side with the story of the discords, the strifes, 
the deep-rooted racial and religious animosities of 
one great group of cities and with the simpler prob- 
lems, the narrower interests and sympathies of the 
cities of homogeneous population. The homoge- 
neous city has virtues and charms which the cos- 



24 The Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. 

mopolitan city lacks ; but it has also defects and 
limitations which the cosmopolitan city escapes. It 
is a city of a type as old as Bagdad and Damascus ; 
the cosmopolitan city is of the new type ; made pos- 
sible by the levelling of the old walls of racial ig- 
norance and prejudice ; prophetic of the new order- 
ing of society in a working fraternity of races. 

The City of New York was founded by a great 
trading company in possession of a monopoly ; but 
this company, like all other human organizations, 
was curiously compounded of selfishness and ideal- 
ism ; it was bent on profits, but it was also bent on 
doing the Lord's work according to its lights, and 
smiting with a mighty hand the power of the King 
of Spain in the western waters. In the pursuit of 
its double purpose, the Dutch West India Company 
filled its coffers with the contents of the Spanish 
treasure ships ; gave substantial aid to the other 
semi-commercial, semi-governmental companies, 
large and small, which swept the Spanish main with 
a resolute audacity and a calculated recklessness 
that have their place among the great traditions of 
daring ; broke the Spanish power at its sources ; 
set the Netherlands free from the paralyzing hand 
of Spain ; made popular government possible in 
America by establishing the supremacy of the Eng- 
lish language and the English and Dutch political 
ideals ; and developed New York as the product and 
symbol of this re-ordering of society. In the final 
summing up of great enterprises it may appear that 



TJie Gcnkis of the Cosmopolitan City. 25 

in the movement of which New York was the fruit 
a service was rendered to the race quite as great as 
the service of those cities which grew out of a sin- 
gle strenuous endeavor for better conditions along 
a single line. Speaking reverently, Providence has 
breadth as well as height, and fertilization is as im- 
portant as elevation. 

Founded by traders, as many of the great cities 
have been founded, New York has always been a 
centre of immense commercial interests and activ- 
ity. Its noble harbor has seen, for almost three 
centuries, the coming and going of ships laden with 
cargoes from the ends of the earth. It is signifi- 
cant that the earliest product of human skill here 
was a ship ; built, Mr. Janvier thinks, on the creek 
which once flowed where Broad Street now runs, 
and near the point where it joins Pearl Street. The 
Dutch builders called this forerunner of the com- 
merce of New York the " Onrust," — the " Rest- 
less" ; a name significant alike of their hopes and 
spirits, and of the world-wide activity of the me- 
tropolis. 

The first faint lines of discovery have always 
been the lines of trade ; and traders were the earliest 
and, far and away, the most fruitful of all the ex- 
plorers. In the dawn of history, the caravans are 
seen moving across the desert from city to city ; at 
a later day, trading ships were skirting the shores 
of the Black Sea, and finding their perilous way 
past the pillars of Hercules to the tin mines of Corn- 



26 Tlie Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. 

wall ; later still, they were crossing the Atlantic to 
fish off the coasts of Newfoundland, and making the 
long voyage around the Cape of Good Hope to 
bring back the spices and silks of the East. 

Some of us who care greatly for art and science 
and religion have fallen so completely into the habit 
of speaking of commerce as if it were in itself a 
thing of evil that when we profess our devotion to 
art other men, with a keener sense of reality, re- 
fuse to take us seriously and declare that we are 
following an artificial and vain image, and not one 
of those ultimate forms of expression which are the 
final flowering of individual genius and of the spirit 
of man. The real question concerns not the neces- 
sity, the educational power, the spiritual signifi- 
cance of commerce ; these things are beyond all 
question in the light of history and of any real 
thinking ; the real question concerns the value we 
put on commerce in comparison with religion, art, 
science, the state. To invert the true order and 
make religion, art, science and politics the servants 
of commerce is to bring in moral anarchy ; to pur- 
sue commerce with passionate eagerness that life 
may be broader, richer, nobler in habit and habita- 
tion is to transform a material energy into a spirit- 
ual opportunity ; and this sublime miracle, — this 
turning of the grape that is fed by the soil and nur- 
tured by the hand into the wine that gives words 
and wings to the spirit, — has been wrought again 
and again. Society still thinks largely in terms of 



TJic Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. 27 

asceticism ; a noble expression of a by-gone age. 
It learns slowly that virtue lies not in a process of 
exclusion but in setting the gifts and graces of life 
in a spiritual order. We are not in the world to 
surrender, but to command its resources of all 
kinds ; we are not here to abdicate, but to govern. 
The way out of the perils which surround us is not 
by becoming poor, but by learning how to use our 
wealth like rational creatures of God's making. 

New York has always been deeply interested in 
ships and canals and railways, the means and in- 
struments of communication which have made the 
modern world possible and brought in, in a rough 
preliminary way, the brotherhood of man. She 
has sometimes cared too much for these things ; 
like Paris, London, Boston, Philadelphia and Chi- 
cago, she has often thought more about comfort 
than about righteousness ; and when she has fallen 
from o-race she has suffered humiliation and borne 
various kinds orpunishment. These things have 
come to her, however, not because she has been 
commercial but because she has confused means 
with ends. There is nothing corrupting in com- 
merce ; it is as honorable to found a city for trad- 
ing purposes as to suddenly descend upon a coun- 
try with galleys, put its inhabitants to the sword, 
and take possession of their estates in the name of 
William of Normandy. Commerce is a peaceful 
and increasingly honest substitute for the wholesale 
thievine of feudal times. 



28 The Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. 

And when it comes to the matter of art it is well 
to remember that Venice, the most poetic render- 
ing of civic necessities in terms of architecture that 
the world has ever known, was the first commer- 
cial city of a great period ; that her palaces were 
built because the ships that lay at their doors were 
laden with the treasures of the East ; that the art 
which translated her religious and civic ideals into 
a language so splendid, so commanding, so signifi- 
cant of greatness of spirit, was cherished, guarded 
and loved by great merchants rather than by great 
princes ; that, speaking soberly, life has never been 
so magnificently dressed as in a city whose genius 
for commerce these later times have not surpassed. 
It is well to remember that Florence, mother of 
great personalities, so completely mistress of the 
arts that she spoke with equal ease and authority 
in architecture, sculpture, painting and poetry, was 
a city whose rulers were called merchant princes. 

The men who founded New York were among 
the foremost traders of their time ; but who has 
loved liberty with a more passionate devotion than 
they, and where does the genius of man interpret 
the soul of man with more commanding and search- 
ing power than on the walls of the galleries of the 
Hague, of Haarlem and of Amsterdam ? 

In this city, in the year 1809, American literature 
was born. Books had been written in the colonies 
and, later, in the states before " Knickerbocker's 
History of New York " appeared ; but these earlier 



Tlie Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. 29 

books were historical, religious, or polemical trea- 
tises ; they were contributions to causes ; Irving 
wrote as birds sing and flowers bloom ; because 
man was made to live, not by work alone, but by 
the free expression of all the interests of his spirit. 
Two elements in Irvino^'s work are significant for 
the present purpose : he was the earliest interpre- 
ter of the old world to the new ; he, more than any 
other among the pioneers of American literature, 
reknit the sundered peoples by bringing back, with 
all the charm of tender sentiment and gentle hu- 
mor, the ripeness and beauty of the old home. 
There are no real breaks in history. This is a new 
country, but we are an old race ; we brought the 
old world with us in our memories or we should 
have been poor indeed. Homer recalled to the 
Greeks the fading memories of Asia, Virgil re- 
minded the Romans of the days and deeds on the 
plains of Troy, Irving brought the imagination of 
an alienated people once more into touch with the 
traditions of their old home and their kin beyond 
the sea, and became the earliest interpreter of the 
spirit of the cosmopolitan city. " His kindly and 
pervasive humor had as little in common with the 
keen, pungent New England humor as his genial 
and urbane spirit had with the strenuous, ethical 
temper of New England. The rigidity of the Puri- 
tan, the concentration of the reformer, were alien 
to his tolerant nature. The intense feeling for the 
locality, the emphasis on the section, characteristic 



50 TJie Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. 

of the south from an early period, were equally 
alien to him. He was a true child of the metropo- 
lis ; tolerant in temper because he was on easy 
terms with many different races, urbane and gra- 
cious because he had found virtue in many kinds of 
men, charm in many kinds of women, and sincerity 
in many kinds of religion ; with a vein of deep and 
tender feeling running through his nature and his 
work, but always relieving the strain of emotion 
with that touch of humor which makes men kin. 
The qualities of the cosmopolitan city were all his : 
urbanity of manner, breadth of view, tolerance of 
temper, and a kindly, easy, genial attitude toward 
life. 

There was no strain of didacticism in Irving, but 
there was an attitude toward life which gave his 
work a beautiful quality of sympathy. "If, how- 
ever," he wrote to a friend, " I can, by a lucky 
chance, in these days of evil, rub out one wrinkle 
from the brow of care, or beguile the heavy heart 
of one moment of sadness ; if I can, now and then, 
penetrate the gathering film of misanthropy, prompt 
a benevolent view of human nature, and make my 
reader more in good humor with his fellow beings 
and himself, surely, surely, I shall not then have 
written in vain. This is the temper of a true citi- 
zen of a metropolis — a place where races meet and 
mingle on easy terms ; slowly and often blindly, but 
none the less surely, through mutual comprehen- 
sion and the tolerance that comes from it, defining 



TJie Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. 31 

in terms of experience the unity of the race and re- 
ahzine the brotherhood of man." * 

The interpreter of the old world to the new, this 
genial man of letters, was a creator of two priceless 
American legends, and the originator of the short 
story ; a literary form of which Americans have 
gained a notable mastery. Here, too, the first 
piece of genuine fiction appeared when Cooper, in 
" The Spy," broke ground for the novelists of the 
future. From the creation of the delightful myth 
of Diedrich Knickerbocker, the first of the long 
line of gentlemen who have gone to Albany leav- 
ing unsettled accounts in New York, to the days 
of Mr. Howells' " Letters Home," the cosmopoli- 
tan qualities of broad human sympathy, deep in- 
terest in human experience, and recognition of the 
fact that another man's conscience may be as au- 
thoritative as your own, have never passed out of 
our writing. In the title of the novel which is 
likely to stand beside " The Rise of Silas Lapham " 
in the judgment of posterity Mr. Howells has hap- 
pily suggested the larger meaning of New York ; 
it is " A Hazard of New Fortunes." 

The later novelists have not failed to notice and 
report the picturesque aspects of the metropolis ; 
Mr. Matthews especially has emphasized the tow- 
ering lines which it shows as one approaches it 
along the great water-ways, the flashing of myriad 
lights from the great buildings at night, the clouds 

* Backgrounds of Literature. By Hamilton W. Mabie. 



32 TJic Genius of tJic Cosmopolitan City. 

of steam which float, mingling and commingling, 
over the city, and give it a touch of mysterious and 
ethereal beauty. 

The genius and the place of New York in the 
modern world are so clearly disclosed in this brief 
recital of significant passages in its history that he 
who runs may read. The very conformation of the 
harbor seems like a symbol of hospitality. Two 
convereinof lines of coast lead to it from the vast- 
ness of the sea, and so uniform is the shelving of 
the coast for a hundred miles in either direction 
that the ship can find her way on the blackest 
night, in the densest fog, with no other guide than 
the plummet. Inside the water gate what a spa- 
cious refuge ! No one can come up from the sea, 
with the richest memories of Europe behind him, 
and not feel the charm which resides in the noble 
moulding of the harbor lines, the beauty of its fram- 
ing of hills, the half-veiled vision of the new world 
of toil and wealth and unlimited resource which 
rises before the imagination as the group of cities 
defines itself and the great bridge swings in air be- 
tween them. 

In no other city do the tides of life niingle with 
such a sweep and in such a volume. New York is 
not one city; it is many cities under one govern- 
ment. Once a Dutch city, a French city, an Eng- 
lish city ; it has become a German, Irish, Italian, 
Russian, Polish, Armenian, Hebrew, Syrian city. 
The eighteen languages spoken here in colonial 



T]ie Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. 33 

times have grown to sixty-six languages and dia- 
lects ; in one school in the Syrian district of the 
city twenty-nine languages and dialects are spoken. 
And the incoming tide has risen to such a height 
that thoughtful men are asking whether so many 
strangers, bred in such diverse faiths and habits of 
life, can be so rapidly housed in American ideas 
and clothed with American associations. 

Here, too, from all parts of the country, flows the 
refluent wave of those who, having come to great 
and often sudden prosperity, seek the ampler 
spending ground of the metropolis. These are the 
people for whom our theatres are multiplied ; for 
whom immense apartment houses are built ; above 
all, these are the people who shine resplendent in 
gorgeous apparel in the most obtrusively magnifi- 
cent of our hotels. One of the chief functions of 
New York in recent years has been to furnish the 
United States of America with adequate opportu- 
nities of spending its money, and giving it expert 
assistance in the process. The metropolis has be- 
come a school for the education of untrained pro- 
vincial millionaires, who come here in great num- 
bers from all parts of our vast country, bringing 
their local customs with them. And it is the hard 
fate of New York to be judged by the manners and 
bearing- of its quests, the journals of civilization in 
remote quarters holding up their hands in hor- 
ror over the extravagance of those who have 
come to us from their own neiMiborhoods. Placed 



34 TJie Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. 

where the sea brings throngs of immigrants from 
the western Hmits of Ireland, to those remote and 
vague distances where " the dawn comes up hke 
thunder outer China 'crost the Bay," and where 
the rivers and railways bring in throngs of highly 
pecunious immigrants from that vast central plain 
over which the smoke of Chicago hangs as the 
cloud once hung over another city of the plain ; 
from the upper reaches of the Mississippi ; from 
Denver, modest and shy metropolis of the mountain 
region ; from San Francisco, feverish with dreams 
of the time when the Atlantic shall be an abandoned 
waterway ; and from the South, hospitable, gener- 
ous, lovable, with just a touch of condescension in 
its manner toward us ; placed, I say, where all 
these tides meet and mingle, is it strange that 
New York is difficult to govern, to understand, to 
define? 

It is easy to put one's hand on the defects and 
vices of the commercial age and spirit. The feudal 
period was far more picturesque, the period of the 
monarchy far more splendid, to the eye. The 
world is a more crowded and a much noisier place 
than it was in the days when Warwick Castle and 
those desolate piles on the Rhine were built, in the 
days when Louis the Magnificent planned his vast 
palaces. But the whole of life does not reside in 
the things which comfort and delight the eye, pre- 
cious as they are. Behind those apparitions of 
what seems, through the mist of years, a better 



The Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. 35 

time, what misery of body, what wretchedness of 
condition, what bondage of the spirit ! They cost 
too much, those old refinements and splendors. 
France starved and went in rags, and men became 
wild and greedy as animals, that the stately pageant 
of Versailles might be played for a few inglorious 
years. And the pageant itself, studied closely, re- 
veals a moral squalor, a poverty of spiritual ideas, 
a lack of nobility which invest it to-day with an air 
of tragic mockery. The charm of the old order was 
bought at too great a price of enforced sacrifice of 
opportunity, health, education, that freedom of the 
spirit without which, in the finest trappings, men 
are puppets or slaves. The old order seems har- 
moniously beautiful, largely because our ignorance 
of the thousand details of condition and habit which 
environed it hides its ugly aspects from us ; and its 
best things were paid for by those who could not 
share them. 

The commercial age, on the other hand, enfolds 
us so closely that no man can understand its ulti- 
mate significance or foresee its final development. 
That it is provisional and not permanent, a stage 
and not the ultimate form of social organization, is, 
however, the inevitable conclusion of the student of 
history and of social science. One thing is clear — 
it is a far more inclusive ordering of men in social 
relations than has been known before. Selfish as it 
is, it opens more doors, makes more opportunities, 
offers more kinds of help, cares more and does more 



36 The Genius of the Cosinopolitaii City. 

for all men, than any earlier ordering of society in 
antiquity or in the Middle Age. 

Commercialism and democracy involve no more 
crudity and vulgarity than did the rule of the aris- 
tocracies in Greece and Rome, of Feudalism and 
Monarchy in western Europe ; they simply do not 
keep crudity and vulgarity in the background. 
Athens had her Cleon, Rome had her mobs whose 
greasy caps offended Shakespeare, England had 
her Wat Tylers fingering with dirty hands the 
robes of royalty. Most people judge by appear- 
ances, and appearances are against modern life. 
There are, perhaps, a dozen persons in a genera- 
tion whose knowledge of present and past con- 
ditions is intimate enough, and whose minds are 
broad enough, to qualify them to make compari- 
sons and reach conclusions ; all other judgments 
are worthless. 

It is far too soon to pass judgment on the sig- 
nificance of the commercial age and the soundness 
and value of democracy ; the modern world is so 
complex and vast that it behooves us to study it more 
clearly and speak of it less confidently. When one 
realizes the depth and vastness of the movement of 
life, the mystery out of which it flows and in which 
it loses itself, the clouds that gather and pass above 
it, the roar and tumult which attend it, the com- 
parison of civilization with civilization on the basis 
of the relative production of books and pictures at 
any particular period, of dress and manners and 



The Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. 37 

social habit in any given country, seems pitifully 
inadequate. In three hundred years it may be pos- 
sible to reach some conclusion about the real mean- 
ing of commercialism and democracy ; to-day one 
can only be sure that society is being reorganized 
in a more inclusive way, that governments rest on a 
broader base, that the free expression of every 
man's personality becomes every decade more com- 
plete, and that men are learning to live together in 
all the ways of thought and of action. 

Of these dominant forces of modern life, New 
York is the product. It has its full share of cru- 
dity, vulgarity and selfishness ; it is rich also in 
aspiration, refinement, distinction of aim and man- 
ner. It is a cosmopolitan city in its liberality, its 
tolerance, its comprehension of the vast variety of 
human experience, its sympathy with the manifold 
objects of human interest, its hospitality to the 
faiths, the traditions, the races of mankind. There 
have been cosmopolitan cities since the days when 
a Greek dynasty ruled in Alexandria, and Jewish 
and Oriental teachers taught all manner of ancient 
learning on the banks of the Nile ; but never be- 
fore have so many races met and ruled together, 
without race, religious or class distinctions, as in 
New York. Here is being formed the city of the 
future ; for the future is to be the common posses- 
sion of all men on a basis of equality of opportu- 
nity. Here, some of us venture to believe, is being 
worked out, on a great scale, in much tumult, con- 



38 The Genius of the Cosmopolitan City. 

fusion and uncertainty, but with an irresistible 
drift at the bottom, that problem of setting all 
men free to be and to do which will ultimately 
evoke the highest in human character and achieve- 
ment. 



PROCEEDINGS. 



PROCEEDINGS OF THE SOCIETY 



The Ninety-ninth Anniversary of the founding of the 
New York Historical Society was celebrated on Tuesday 
afternoon, November 17, 1903, by laying the corner-stone 
of the Society's new building, on Central Park West, 
Seventy-sixth to Seventy-seventh Streets, and later by an 
address entitled "The Genius of the Cosmopolitan City," 
delivered by Mr. Hamilton W. JNIabie. 

The ofificers, members, and guests of the society assem- 
bled in the Wood Room of the American Museum of 
Natural History, and from there crossed to the site of the 
corner-stone. Mr. Samuel Verplanck Hoffman, President 
of the Society, called the assembly to order, and intro- 
duced the Rev. Charles Edward Brugler, who delivered 
the Invocation. 

The President delivered an historical outline of the 
Society from its founding in 1804 to 1903, and concluded 
the same with a brief account of the memorabilia con- 
tained in the copper box which was placed within the 
corner-stone. 

The President introduced the Hon. Seth Low, LL.D., 
Mayor of the City of New York, who laid the corner-stone 
of the Society's new building, using a silver trowel with an 
ebony handle, the trowel having an appropriate inscrip- 
tion engraved thereon. 

The assembly returned to the Lecture Hall of the 
American Museum of Natural History, where the anni- 

41 



42 Proceedings of the Soeiety. 

versary address was delivered by Mr. Hamilton W. 
Mabie. 

Upon its conclusion, Mr. Fordham Morris, with re- 
marks, offered the following resolution, which was sec- 
onded by Mr. George R. Schieffelin. and unanimously 
adopted : 

Resolved, That the thanks of The New York Historical 
Society be, and they hereby are extended to Mr. Hamil- 
ton W. Mabie, for his able, learned, and eloquent address 
of November 17, 1903, on the occasion of the laying of the 
corner-stone of the new building of the Society and the 
Ninety-ninth Anniversary of its founding, and that Mr. 
Mabie be requested to furnish a copy of his address so that 
it may be published by the Society and be deposited with 

its Archives. 

Extract from the minutes. 

Sydney H. Carney, Jr., 

Recording Secretary. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

■11! 

014 108 653 4 I 



